Samsung Patent Unveils Idea For Smart Contact Lenses With A Camera And Display

If you have seen the movie Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, then you may remember the scene where
IMF agent William Brandt (played by Jeremy Renner) used a smart contact lens to take photos of nuclear codes. After watching that scene, I wondered why smart contact lenses did not exist yet. It turns out Samsung may be pursuing the idea of a smart contact lens, according to a patent that recently surfaced.

The patent -- which was filed in South Korea -- describes a contact lens where a small display unit is placed in the center. SamMobile reported that Samsung's smart contact lens also has a camera, an antenna and sensors that detects movements. The camera built into the Samsung smart contact lens would be controlled by blinking. And the Wi-Fi antenna in the smart contact lens enables the wearable device to communicate with an external device to process data such as a smartphone or tablet. The blinking feature would work in a way that is similar to how
Google Glass took photos when the user winked.

You may recall that Samsung is not the only technology company pursuing the idea of smart contact lenses.Google announced Google Contact Lens in January 2014, which is a wearable device that is expected to assist people with diabetes to measure glucose levels in tear drops. Google Contact Lens is being overseen by Alphabet’s life sciences arm called Verily, a former division of Google X. Samsung’s patent for a smart contact lens recently surfaced, but the application actually dates back to 2014 as well.

And last year, a research team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology revealed it was working on magnifying contact lenses that can zoom in and out by winking. IFLScience said that the telescopes integrated into those lenses were “first developed with funding from DARPA as superthin cameras for aerial drones, but they were later converted into a vision-enhancing system.”

Whatever Happened To Google Glass?

Google revealed the Google Glass wearable headset back in February 2013. Back then, Forbes staff writer Ryan Mac recounted a conversation between
Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg and Google cofounder Sergey Brin after an event for the Breakthrough Prize For Life Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. When trying on Google Glass, Zuckerberg asked Brin “how do you look out from this without looking awkward?” He asked, “you know, how are you supposed to use these this without breaking eye contact?” Zuckerberg was genuinely interested in getting a pair of Google Glass so the social network company could build apps for it.

Google started selling Google Glass to “Glass Explorers” for $1,500 in April 2013 and then released it to the public about a year later. But Google Glass ended up being widely criticized for privacy concerns and the product was banned from many establishments, including casinos and movie theaters. Last year, Google decided to stop building the first generation of Google Glass and go back to the drawing board. Then in July 2015, Google started to distribute a new version of Google Glass without a wire-frame designed specifically for healthcare, manufacturing and energy professionals.